Blackline: What Is It?

BlackLine provides a host of services that help businesses maintain better control over financial actions. Additionally, the BlackLine applications streamline activities through enhanced automation. While services like accounts payable, fixed assets, and general ledger are left to other applications, BlackLine is more concerned with maintaining established controls, particularly where it’s vital to ensure closings are accurate and complete.

Additionally, the BlackLine applications are capable of incorporating balances from different subsystems and reconciling the discrepancies. The program can also be used to enhance the sharing of data between legal agencies and other entities, such as ERP systems. This makes financial reporting more efficient than in many other applications from other developers.

While it may sound like BlackLine is little more than a reporting tool, it does much more than that. It reduces the work usually assigned to accountants by completing routine monthly, quarterly, and yearly tasks. Generating these reports does little by way of helping the business grow, so, by leaving these tasks to the BlackLine application, company personnel can be assigned more productive tasks.
The application has already generated plenty attention from business owners with an interest in the services provided. One reason may be the cloud solution that BlackLine provides, currently available in more than a hundred countries. This means data can be addressed by any subsidiary in almost any country and all that’s needed is a device and an internet connection. For this reason, companies with a worldwide reach and multiple subsidiaries can reap the most benefits from using BlackLine.

Previously, ERP applications have sought to provide a complete accounting platform, but most fell short in several key areas. BlackLine developers identified those shortcomings and based their product around supplying those unmet needs. While previous platforms focused primarily on the transactions involved in accounting, BlackLine pays closer attention to the processes involved in completing those transactions. This gives the user greater control, sharing data across multiple systems and in various geographical locations.

As businesses spend more time and resources in digitizing their records and transactions, BlackLine may soon become the benchmark for future financial software applications. Greater control will need to be granted to the business, so data can be shared across a range of diverse platforms. Additionally, adapting applications to be accessed via the cloud is becoming increasingly more important. By already incorporating these factors, BlackLine is poised to lead the way in the next phase of the digital revolution.